I'm expecting a new disk for the old iMac to arrive today. It'll be the second replacement.
The 2008 vintage machine has become rather sluggish and I'm pretty sure it's the hard drive that has begun to wear out.
In an attempt to bypass the problem, I ran Disk Utility's First Aid and then rebuilt the catalog's B-tree index using that sudo fsck_hfs -r -d /dev/disk0s2 terminal command, which isn't for the faint hearted (I had to look it up to be sure I'd get the right syntax). The command took around 20 minutes looping through its repair sequence 3 times before it declared everything was once more tickety-boo.
I'm getting the subliminal message that all is not really well.
Temporarily, I've created a copy of the internal drive using Carbon Copy Clone, and have been externally booting the computer from that, across a USB link. It's already faster than using the internal disk, so it is really time for a new disk.
I've decided to move it to SSD, which means it should run faster.
A typical HDD takes about 5,000 to 10,000 microseconds to access data. By comparison, an SSD has access speeds of 35 to 100 microseconds, which is nearly 100 times faster.
If it works then it should breathe new life into the machine. I'll update when I've attempted the exchange. Meanwhile, here's that video of Grace Hopper explaining about nano and microseconds.
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